Harvest of Despair

“If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot,” declared Nazi commissar Erich Koch. To the Nazi leaders, the Ukrainians were Untermenschen—subhumans. But the rich land was deemed prime territory for Lebensraum expansion. Once the Germans rid the country of Jews, Roma, and Bolsheviks, the Ukrainians would be used to harvest the land for the master race.Karel Berkhoff provides a searing portrait of life in the Third Reich’s largest colony. Under the Nazis, a blend of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racist notions about the Slavs produced a reign of terror and genocide. But it is impossible to understand fully Ukraine’s response to this assault without addressing the impact of decades of repressive Soviet rule. Berkhoff shows how a pervasive Soviet mentality worked against solidarity, which helps explain why the vast majority of the population did not resist the Germans. He also challenges standard views of wartime eastern Europe by treating in a more nuanced way issues of collaboration and local anti-Semitism.Berkhoff offers a multifaceted discussion that includes the brutal nature of the Nazi administration; the genocide of the Jews and Roma; the deliberate starving of Kiev; mass deportations within and beyond Ukraine; the role of ethnic Germans; religion and national culture; partisans and the German response; and the desperate struggle to stay alive. Harvest of Despair is a gripping depiction of ordinary people trying to survive extraordinary events.

This is an amazing book, a real milestone in the literature. Everyone interested in the history of Ukraine, the Soviet Union, World War II, and the Holocaust will surely want to read it. The description of the purposeful starving of Kiev is especially poignant. By the end, the reader is left with a sense of the hopelessness and terror of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. Karel Berkhoff has told this very important story--central to the history of World War II--as no one else has. I recommend Harvest of Despair with enthusiasm., A pioneering study of the German occupation of Soviet Ukraine...Before Berkhoff, no historian had confronted, with such seriousness and such an impressive range of archival sources, the alternation of Soviet and Nazi rule in Ukraine...He reveals the horrifying extent of human adaptability, and the appalling variety of human suffering. This human element, perhaps, is [this book's] most timely offering. In today's Europe, as the 1930s and 40s are re-evaluated, and narratives of victimhood gain importance, it is useful to know where European totalitarianism was at its blackest., Berkhoff's book is an extraordinary piece of research that contributes much to an understanding of modern Ukraine., It is less a history of the occupation that Karel C. Berkhoff presents in his important and accessibly written book than the story of the experience of the seventeen million inhabitants of the German Reichskommissariat Ukraine from 1941 to 1944...Berkhoff has written the best book on the subject so far and contributes greatly to the research on Ukraine during the German occupation., Berkhoff has presented the most detailed analysis of an Eastern European population under Nazi rule to date. By integrating previously unused German security service reports from Ukrainian archives with an imposing collection of Ukrainian source material, both archival and in the form of memoirs, the author has produced an important book that would benefit both upper-division students and specialists alike. While he makes a strong contribution to the historiography concerning German goals and policies in the occupied Soviet Union, his focus on the people at the sharp end of these policies constitutes his outstanding achievement. Instead of merely describing the bureaucratic nature of Nazi occupation, Berkhoff has allowed the victims to speak. They have painted a vivid picture of the terror at the heart of Nazi rule.

Karel C. Berkhoff is Senior Researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.